It was 2010 when Mike Cruickshank’s Bonus Bagging entered the market place as the definitive tool to help people make money from matched betting irrespective of whether they had any pre-existing knowledge of placing bets at bookmakers offline or online.

The fact that four years later it’s still going strong perhaps tells us all we need know to answer the question posed in the title of this post as to whether Bonus Bagging (or more broadly matched betting) is still working in 2014?

Rather than just tell you “YES IT IS!” I wanted to take a few minutes to write a more structured response to exactly why it still works and how so this supposed loophole has yet to be closed down. [Read more…]

So this will be my final post of this series exploring how to profit from bookmakers free bets through bonus bagging techniques. It is my hope that you will have benefited from watching my demonstrations and may now have the confidence to go for it yourself. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s so incredibly easy to supplement your income with bonus bagging.

Racing Santander vs. Guadalajara yesterday was a 0-0 bore draw. This worked out quite nicely for us as it meant we lost at Coral and won at Betfair.

Getafe lost to Rayo Vallecano 2-1. Our Bwin bet on Getafe obviously lost with the lay winning at Betfair. In there being 3 goals in the match only, our ‘Over 3.5 Goals’ StanJames free bet also lost while winning at Betfair.

For our Ladbrokes qualifying bet we’ve been waiting on a while now, Osasuna beat Sevilla 1-0. This means we lost at the bookmaker and again won at the Betting Exchange. Another good turn of events!

So our Betfair account is looking rosy again with thanks to winning a few lays there and losing bets at the bookmakers.

Time to place our bets for today:

I request an email and receive my Bwin free bet instructions.

I place my £20 free bet on Draw of this Polish game at odds of 3.4 as instructed.

At Betfair I lay £19.71 at odds of 3.5 on the draw.

Thanks to the “stake returned” £20 free bet from Bwin I will profit £19.71. Great!

I now request the a bet to make use of my £10 Ladbrokes free bet:

I’m told to bet and lay Hoffenheim.

I stake the £10 fre bet at odds of 3.00.

I lay £6.35 on odds of 3.2 which leaves a liability of £13.97 if the lay loses.

Through this bet I’ve locked in a profit of £6.35. But remember – the Ladbrokes offer was bet £10 and get 3 x £10 free bets. I still have 2 x £10 free bets to come over the next couple of weeks which will guarantee an additional £12-15. Good stuff!

And that’s where I’m going to leave this demonstration of risk-free bonus bagging to guarantee profit from bookmakers free bets.

Profit Total: £76.34 + £19.71 + £6.35 = £102.40

So that’s 7 days of betting complete and I’ve made just over £100. It’s probably taken me 10 minutes a day to place my bets. £102.40 / 70 minutes = £1.46 a minute or £87.77 an hour. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not a salary you would sniff at. Could you make use of an extra £100 a week?

Despite the betting offers keeping coming I decided to take the day off yesterday to allow account balances to recover once bets have settled. This isn’t neccasary if your bankroll is big enough to continue depositing without waiting for withdrawals, but I always advise players new to the game to take things slowly to start out. In fact – for complete novices I would actually look to tackle one bookmaker at a time to avoid confusion. The purpose of this bonus bagging trial I’m publishing here is an example of what can be achieved when you get the hang of things.

Let’s look at what transpired as I enjoyed my Saturday away from the online bookmakers:

Thun beat Sion 1-0 meaning my £10 StanJames bet won and I lost at Betfair.

Alcorcon lost to Almeria 3-0 which will have made Coral happy in losing my bet with them, but me equally happy for winning at Betfair.

I request a bet to place for my StanJames free bet and receive this email.

I find the odds at StanJames and place my £10 free bet.

At Betfair I lay ‘Over 3.5 Goals’ for £6.92 at odds of 3.3

Sweet. So that’s StanJames knocked off the list and out of the way then. I’ll be making £6.92 regardless of the outcome between Getafe and Rayo Vallecano thanks to the £10 free bet.

Now it’s time to use up that generous £50 free bet Coral have gifted me:

Mike sends email a few minutes after clicking the button on the Bonus Bagging web site.

Before we go any further let’s inspect this email properly. As always – we need to pay attention to the liability as underlined in the image. This is the amount we need to have in our Betfair account in case the bet loses. Of course for us we are never actually going to lose this money because it will win at the bookmaker.

Why such a big liability this time? Well – we are using a £50 free bet and generally when a free bet wins we pick up the winnings but are not given the stake back. This is most commonly known as a “stake not returned” bonus. In order to profit most from stake not returned bonuses we look for high odds matches that will maximise our winnings.

We currently only have £128.91 available in our Betfair account whilst we have money tied up waiting for 3 others bets to settle (Ladbrokes, Bwin and StanJames). To avoid situations like this – as I stated earlier – this is why it is advisable to take things slowly to begin with while you build your account balances up.

So I can continue this guide to beating betting offers through bonus bagging I’m going to suggest we redeposit into Betfair £70 taking our balance up to £198.91.

As per instruction I head over to Coral and put my £50 free bet on Guadalajara at odds of 5.5.

I carefully lay Guadalajara at Betfair for £37.82 at odds of 6 after checking my balance is big enough to cover the liability.

Boosh! Locked in a £37.82 profit from that free bet. Not a bad a result at all but I’m going to have to play the waiting game again whilst bets settle and my Betfair balance gets back to normal and won’t signup to a new bookmaker yet.

Profit Total: £31.60 + £6.92 + £37.82 = £76.34

I’ve actually doubled my profit total today through placing those two bets. What’s more I have a £10 and £20 free bet to come tomorrow which should sit me up close to the £100 profit mark as I near the end of my look at the bonus bagging service. Not bad for a few minutes work! But it’s not over yet. For purpose of this trial I’ve got one more day of profiting from bookmakers free bets!

I think we can conclude from my previous posts that the Bonus Bagging arbitrage software works. More importantly, it works well! There hasn’t ever been a point where we’ve been stuck. All instructions are outlined thoroughly and all eventualities of betting scenarios have been considered in its design.

My primary reason for championing this service however is its ability to save time. I don’t want to sit at the computer all day ploughing through bookmaker odds. I’ve done it before. It makes my eyes twitch. That’s why I consider being able to press a button and have all the calculations done for me such a luxury.

To provide this bonus bagging arbitrage software trial for you takes me about 40 minutes every day. 30 minutes of that is taking the screenshots and writing. The actual betting accounts for 10 minutes. Can anybody tell me any other ways to make between £10 and £50 a day risk-free for 10 minutes work? There certainly aren’t many!

Our free bet from Day 2 settled last night. Hoffenheim beat Kaiserslautern 3-1. This meant our PaddyPower bet on the draw lost and our Betfair bet against the draw won.

Halmstads and Norrkoping drew 1-1 meaning our William Hill bet won and we lost at Betfair.

We are being slowed down a bit due to our bets being on football matches over the weekend. We obviously need to wait for them to settle but in the meantime they are killing our Betfair balance. I could wait for these games to finish before continuing. However, for sake of demonstrating the bonus bagging arbitrage software over these 7 days I want to continue with the momentum. To pump up our Betfair balance I’m going to deposit the money I withdrew from Skybet (£22.50) a couple of days back along with the £21 and £60 I just removed from PaddyPower and William Hill.

New Betfair Balance: £119.94

Time to start betting. Let’s hit ‘Request New Bet’ and see where we’re headed today.

It’s a £20 free bet today!

After clicking the link I head off to the bookmaker.

On arrival at Bwin they are keen to remind me of the money they want to give me!

After signing up I navigate to the odds.

I load up my bet slip, check it and place the bet.

Ok so I’m betting on Getafe to beat Rayo Vallecano for £20 at odds of 2.20 at Bwin. Now let’s head over to Betfair..

I lay £20.09 against Getafe at odds of 2.24.

In qualifying for the £20 free bet I will lose 91p between my Bwin bet and Betfair. That’s a pretty good qualifying bet. Of note – this match will be played on Sunday so I’ll need to wait till then before I can do anything more here.

Got time for another bookmaker? I think so..

I request my bet and Mike sends me a new email.

It’s a great offer. Awesome. Now we’re slowly creeping towards making some big money. Time to place the bets:

I’ll be betting on Alcorcon for £49.80 at odds of 2.56.

I deposit and place £50 on the selection.

At Betfair I lay £49.80 at odds of 2.56 as per the instructions in the email.

All done. Between Coral and Betfair I will have locked in a loss totalling £2.69 to be rewarded a free bet of £50. You can’t complain with that! This match will finish on Saturday and along with my ongoing Ladbrokes and StanJames bets I currently have quite a bit of exposure at Betfair. Instead of continuing to redeposit I think tomorrow I will take a day off. Normal service will be resumed on Sunday when my money has been freed up.

Think of the bonus bagging service I’ve been trialling as a matched betting guide. It guides you to do everything. You don’t really need to think. If you’ve been following my daily posts you will have no doubt noticed the ease in extracting bonus free bets from bookmakers. In an interview with Mike he put it to me perfectly: “It’s monkey see, monkey do.”

Our win bet on Giannina in their game last night with Atromitos lost at William Hill and won at Betfair. The game finished 1-1.

Good stuff. So first off let’s take care of that William Hill free bet. I head on over to the Bonus Bagging control panel:

I select the bookmaker, enter the stake and hit ‘Claim free bet’.

Within a few minutes I receive an email with instructions.

The instructions are laid out clearly for me to follow.

I click the link and head on over to William Hill.

I’m told to back the draw between Halmstads and Norrkoping for £25 at odds of 3.4

As annotated on my image – when you have been awarded a free bet it will show up in the bet slip. Mine hasn’t here because as I mentioned before I am paper betting for point of demonstration. I already have accounts with all these bookmakers through bonus bagging myself and cannot sign up to them again.

Now my free bet is placed I need to lay the bet off at Betfair.

I’m laying the Draw at Betfair for £17.39 at odds of 3.5.

So now, whatever happens in the event, I have made £17.39 with thanks to the free bet William Hill awarded me. There is none of the risk that would come with gambling a free bet.

Through both backing AND laying, I have locked in the profit.

Time to sign up to my next bookmaker. First though – if you haven’t watched it already then make sure you take 10 minutes of your time to watch my step by step bonus bagging video. Those of you who’ve watched it already will have observed the bookmaker I am bonus bagging on that occasion is StanJames. Of course, I also want to include the details of it in this walkthrough.

I can’t click ‘Request New Bet’ because I’ve already been sent the StanJames qualifying bet email when I produced that matched betting guide screencast. Instead, I’m going to show you another feature of the Bonus Bagging service that allows you to request a new bet if for any reason you cannot place your bet in the first instance.Mmaybe you had to leave your computer and didn’t have chance to sign up to a bookmaker as instructed. You now return to your computer and find the odds have moved dramatically or that event is already over! Don’t worry. Regardless of the circumstance you can head on over to the control panel and navigate to the ‘Missed Bets’ area.

Here you can select the bookmaker you require a new bet for and have a new email sent out to you.

Intuitive and easy. I can’t go wrong. Within minutes I have a new arrival in my inbox..

I’ll be placing this bet at StanJames on Swiss Football!

I navigate to the StanJames web site and find my bet.

I’m betting on Thun to beat Sion.

I deposit and stake £10 at odds of 3.25.

After heading back to the email I can click the link and head on over to the Betfair market.

At Betfair I lay Thun for £10.16 at odds of 3.25. I need £22.86 in my account to cover this bet.

Between the StanJames qualifying bet and the Betfair lay I stand to lose 35p, but I will gain a £10 free bet when the match concludes this evening.

Before I end my Bonus Bagging matched betting guide for today, let’s look at the figures: